51 replies to this topic

[mattw]

IMHO this Vulcan announcement may or may not help but Metal and the number of quality triple A titles coming - especially from Feral these days is probably as good as we have ever seen.

The hardware situation remains uncertain due to the push for thin and long waits between revisions. The option of external GPUs may help overcome this to some degree.

Unknown is the effect of the 32-bit purge - will titles get patched or will work arounds appear? It may also kill off WINE on Macs which removes a way of getting access to many classics.

Both consoles have recent updates so should present a reasonably static target hardware level for game developers today so Macs that can offer this level of gaming performance should be OK for a while I would guess. Also the currency miners have put GPU upgrades out of reach for many average PC gamers so the rate of progress there may be slower until (or even if) this can be resolved.

[Janichsan]

mattw, on 28 February 2018 - 05:36 AM, said:

Unknown is the effect of the 32-bit purge - will titles get patched or will work arounds appear? It may also kill off WINE on Macs which removes a way of getting access to many classics.

There already is a 64 bit version of Wine.

[Thain Esh Kelch]

G_Player, on 28 February 2018 - 02:22 AM, said:

So, gentlemen, given that Metal2 has been out for a bit and now there are Metal "backends", since I know next to nothing about programming, how would you rate the current state of (and future) of Mac gaming?

Is there more hope now?

Unchanged, as the current state of MoltenVK is not in a shape where AAA games will use it.

[Spike]

Thain Esh Kelch, on 28 February 2018 - 09:18 AM, said:

Unchanged, as the current state of MoltenVK is not in a shape where AAA games will use it.

So DOTA 2 (and more coming) is not a AAA game?

[MrUNIMOG]

Spike, on 28 February 2018 - 10:33 AM, said:

So DOTA 2 (and more coming) is not a AAA game?

Dota? Not really I guess.

[jeannot]

Dota 2 is pretty basic in the graphics department.

[mattw]

<p>

Janichsan, on 28 February 2018 - 05:59 AM, said:

There already is a 64 bit version of Wine.

Yes there are betas etc. but the last point they note is the problem:

"Current Wine includes support for 64 bit Wine on Mac OS X; however, this has not been tested very much, and some applications may never work due to an ABI incompatibility between Win64 and OS X".

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Spike, on 28 February 2018 - 10:33 AM, said:

So DOTA 2 (and more coming) is not a AAA game?

I do consider it an AAA game, but as other mention, it is pretty basic in the graphics department, even though it looks good as such.

But the main point here is more that MoltenVK is not supporting the full set of Vulkan features, making it unuseable for many modern AAA games.

[UmarOMC1]

MoltenVK Sees Big Update To Jump-Start Vulkan On macOS In 2019

Changes noted on their GitHub changelog;

• Support runtime config via runtime environment variables
  
• Add full ImageView swizzling to config, and disable it by default.
  
• Add GPU switching to config, and enable it by default.
  
• Add queue family specialization to config, and disable it by default.
  
• Enable synchronous queue submits as config default.
  
• Support 4 queue families.
  
• Pad fragment shader output to 4 components when needed.
  
• Add support for copying to and from PVRTC images.
  
• Log Vulkan versions in human readable form when reporting version error.
  
• Update VK_MVK_MOLTENVK_SPEC_VERSION to 16.
  
• Update copyright to 2019.
  
• Advertise the VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float extension.
  
• Support the VK_KHR_variable_pointers extension.
  
• MoltenVKShaderConverter tool exit with fail code on any file conversion fail.
  
• Update to latest dependency libraries for Vulkan SDK 1.1.97.
  
• Update to latest SPIRV-Cross version:
  
  • MSL: Support SPV_KHR_variable_pointers.
    
  • MSL: Workaround missing gradient2d() on macOS for typical cascaded shadow mapping.
    
  • MSL: Fix mapping of identity-swizzled components.
    
  • MSL: Support composites inside I/O blocks.
    
  • MSL: Fix case where we pass arrays to functions by value.
    
  • MSL: Add option to pad fragment outputs.
    
  • MSL: Fix passing a sampled image to a function.
    
  • MSL: Support std140 packing rules for float[] and float2[].
    
  • MSL: Fix image load/store for short vectors.
    
  • Performance improvements on iterating internal constructs.
    
  • Update copyright to 2019.

[Janichsan]

Holy crap, MoltenVK is already one year open source? The time flies…

Anyway, the more interesting question would be if the so far very limited feature set supported by MoltenVK has been in any way extended to match the Windows/Linux Vulkan desktop feature set. From this change log, it doesn't really look that way.

And another thing: "…so far the likes of Feral Interactive and Aspyr have been quiet on whether they plan to use MoltenVK to ease their porting burden." That is wrong, though. Feral has made very clear that they won't use MoltenVK, as they have an existing and well-working Metal development pipeline.

[Boland]

Janichsan, on 21 January 2019 - 06:55 AM, said:

Holy crap, MoltenVK is already one year open source? The time flies…

Anyway, the more interesting question would be if the so far very limited feature set supported by MoltenVK has been in any way extended to match the Windows/Linux Vulkan desktop feature set. From this change log, it doesn't really look that way.

And another thing: "…so far the likes of Feral Interactive and Aspyr have been quiet on whether they plan to use MoltenVK to ease their porting burden." That is wrong, though. Feral has made very clear that they won't use MoltenVK, as they have an existing and well-working Metal development pipeline.

Regarding the  "…so far the likes of Feral Interactive and Aspyr have been quiet on whether they plan to use MoltenVK to ease their porting burden."
It's simply the fantasies of what's mainly a Linux site... As you said, Feral have been very clear about it.

On another note.. MoltenVK still sucks (looks at ESO).

[jeannot]

Did a quick comparison today on Dota2. The moltenVK version is not faster than the openGL one at 1080p on my 5K iMac running Mojave.
At >4k (4096*something), it's ~25% faster than openGL
Vulkan/DX11 on Windows is ~55% faster than moltenVK at 1080p. Clearly, the translation layer comes at a CPU cost.
The openGL windows version appears bugged. Too bad, it would have been nice to compare to macOS openGL.